Jack, Bobby, Ted in Cape Cod

JFK and family 1961

JFK in rocking chair

Translate Blog

Subscribe To

Recommended Books

Thursday, December 26, 2013

John Whitten - "Scelso"

From Jefferson Morley's JFK facts.org blog

John Whitten is a rare hero of the JFK story. He was a senior
CIA official who sought, behind the scenes, to conduct an honest investigation
of what the agency knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, before
President Kennedy was killed.

But at a meeting on Christmas Eve 1963 deputy director CIA
Richard Helms and counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton shut down Whitten’s
efforts to investigate Oswald’s contacts among pro- and anti-Castro Cubans and
relieved him of his responsibilities for investigating JFK’s assassination.

Whitten’s story, which I first reported in the Washington Monthly in 2003, illuminated
the inner workings of the CIA in the days and weeks after JFK was killed. It is
the story of a “good spy” whose pursuit of the truth about JFK’s death cost him
his career.

Whitten’s ordeal in December 1963 was so sensitive it
could only be recounted behind closed doors on Capitol Hill fifteen years later
and would only become public knowledge twenty years after that. As the 50th anniversary of
the JFK’s death approaches, Whitten’s story endures as a cautionary tale of how
two top CIA officials prevented a real investigation of JFK’s assassination.

Whitten told the story only twice, in 1976 and 1978; it is well-corroborated by other
CIA records.

At a CIA staff meeting the day after President Kennedy was
killed, Helms put Whitten in charge of reviewing all Agency files on Oswald.
He was chief of the Mexico and Central America desk of the clandestine
service, which meant he was familiar with all CIA operations in the region.
Oswald had visited Mexico in October 1963 so his experience was relevant.

Whitten was also highly regarded as an investigator. He had
pioneered the use of the polygraph at the Agency and built a track record of
success in counterespionage investigations. A brilliant if overbearing man, he
assembled a staff of thirty people and worked eighteen hours a day to read
every report related to the assassination, no matter how ludicrous or trivial.
Within two weeks, he had drafted a 23-page “Preliminary biographical study on
Lee Harvey OSWALD.” He circulated it to various offices in the clandestine
service asking for comment.

Angleton was annoyed by his efforts, Whitten said.

“In the early stage Mr. Angleton was not able to influence the
course of the investigation, which was a source of great bitterness to
him,” Whitten recounted to the Church Committee 13 years later.
“He was extremely embittered that I was entrusted with the investigation
and he wasn’t. Angleton then sandbagged me as quickly as he could.”

Whitten soon discovered he, like Mexico City station chief Win
Scott, had been cut out of the loop on information about Oswald. His
realization came on December 6, 1963 when the FBI informed the CIA that its
initial report on Oswald was done and appropriate CIA officials were free
to review it before its release on Dec. 9.

The Counterintelligence (CI) Staff, which had been watching
Oswald since 1959, was also interested in the FBI’s findings, so Whitten went
to the Justice Department accompanied by Birch O’Neal, the chief of a highly
secretive office within the CI staff, called the Special Investigations Group.
O’Neal’s office, known as CI/SIG/, had controlled access to Oswald’s CIA file
ever since Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959.

As Whitten recalled in his secret sworn testimony:

“We went to Mr. Katzenbach’s office in the Department of
Justice and read this very thick report, For the first time I learned a myriad
of vital facts about Oswald’s background which apparently the FBI had known
throughout the initial investigation and had not communicated to me. …Reading
Katzenbach’s report for the first time I learned that the FBI was in possession
of diary-like material which Oswald had had in his possession and was found
after the assassination. I learned for the first time that Oswald was the man
who had taken a pot shot at General Edwin Walker, two key facts in the entire
case.”

In his diary Oswald wrote about his plans to confront the
anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate in New Orleans and provoke a fight with
them. The FBI’s information was relevant to any understanding of Oswald, and no
one had told Whitten, nominally the man in charge of the agency’s Oswald file
review.

“None of this had been passed to us,” Whitten complained. He
was specific about the information that had been denied to him:

“Oswald’s involvement with the pro-Castro movement in the United
States was not at all surfaced to us [meaning him and his staff] in the first
weeks of the investigation,” he said.

Whitten had never gotten the FBI reports on Oswald from Dallas
and New Orleans. All he knew about Oswald’s encounters with the anti-Castro
students came from the Washington Post, even though the group was funded by the
CIA and run by a highly regarded officer named George Joannides.

Whitten continued to circulate his draft report, incorporating
comments along the way. His probe came to an abrupt end two weeks later when he
distributed a final draft of his report, now 61 pages long. He acknowledged its
shortcomings. It was not, he noted, “a full appreciation of either the
FBI report as such or of other material we hope to get from the FBI today.”

On Christmas Eve Helms called a meeting in his office to review
Whitten’s draft, and invited Angleton to comment. Whitten gave a summary of
what he remembered from the FBI report and said his report was “obviously
useless” in light of the information it did not contain. He said more
investigation was needed. He suggested that the Soviet Bloc offices of the clandestine
service analyze the Soviet angles in Oswald’s diary. He also thought Oswald’s
Cuban connections deserved more scrutiny. In retrospect, he said “the
whole investigation” should have moved to Miami.

Angleton ignored Whitten’s suggestions and disparaged his work.

“This report has so many errors in it we can’t possibly send it
over to the FBI,” he said.

Whitten protested that no one had ever envisioned sending the
document to the Bureau. Angleton said the Oswald investigation should be turned
over to the Counterintelligence Staff. Helms agreed on the spot. Whitten
returned to his duties on the Mexico and Central American desk.

Whitten was relieved of his job, Helms explained, because “we could see
that this investigation was broadening far beyond Mexico City and it did not
make much sense to have it in the hands of a man who was running the Mexico
City desk.”

That wasn’t true, at least not for the CIA. As J.C. King had
told station chief Winston Scott, Mexico City was the only major overseas
station reporting on the case.

“Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in
bed with the FBI,” he said. “I was not and Angleton was. ”

Whitten mistrusted Angleton. He told the Church Committeethat he once
sought to help the Justice Department identify the Panamanian bank accounts of
Las Vegas casino owners who were skimming the daily take. When he tried
to get CIA approval to obtain the information, Angleton killed the proposal.
Whitten complained to division chief J.C. King.

“Well, what do you expect?” asked King.

“Well, I didn’t expect that,” Whitten huffed.

“You know Angleton has these ties to the Mafia” King said, “and
he is not going to do anything to jeopardize them.”

“I didn’t know that,” Whitten said.

“Yeah,” said King. “It had to do with Cuba.”

Thanks to Helms and Angleton, there would be no internal
investigation of Oswald’s Cuban contacts. As an sometimes provocative leftist,
Oswald had attracted close attention from some anti-Castro exiles. But on that
subject, the independent-minded John Whitten could not be trusted.

“Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in
bed with the FBI,” Whitten had said, and that someone was James Angleton. They
had a mutually protective relationship. The nature and extent of the CIA’s
contacts with Oswald before JFK was killed would be concealed from
investigators and the public for the next thirty years.

After his Christmas Eve 1963 confrontation with Angleton and
Helms, Whitten never received another promotion. In 1970 he retired and moved
to Vienna where he became a professional singer.

In the late 1990s, his testimony about the abortive Oswald investigation
was declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). But the CIA
insisted on keeping Whitten’s real name out of the public record (the pseudonym
“John Scelso” was used).

Whitten died in a Pennsylvania nursing home in 2000, silenced by
his former employer and unknown to his countrymen.